Have you seen the illustrations for Hikaru no Go? They are very cute. I haven’t read the manga or seen the anime, but the illustrations are very tempting.

I’ve decided that if a manga has beautiful illustrations, then it will still be very successful even if the story isn’t that great. Look at Tanemura Arina, Clamp, and Katsura Masakazu, just to name a few. Their stories could be utter crap, and people will still devour the manga because the drawings are so beautiful.

So using IRC to share files is very cool but deadly slow. What I’ve discovered: I think it’s very easy to host an fserve from your home with just a junk computer and a modem/DSL connection. So there are a ton of fserves out there. There are hundreds of channels with hundreds of fserves listed on them. So you cruise the channels, and then search the servers, looking for the file you want.

It’s very very cool. Right now, I’m downloading my very first anime digisub .avi file off IRC. We’ll see how it comes out.

While learning about all this IRC stuff and digital media, I feel like Neo when he first woke up after he left the Matrix.

Writing is soooo hard!!! It’s so hard!!!! How does anyone ever even write a single sentence?! It’s like pulling teeth without the anesthesia.

Pain! Great pain! :-((

Btw, I’ve been reading a lot of shoujo manga. I am sooooooooooooooo very very very sick (read: amazingly super unbelievably sick) of the “girl meets cute boy, likes boy at first because he’s cute, then discovers boy is an obnoxious jerk and doesn’t like him, then slowly falls in love with him despite the fact that he’s a jerk” story line. Bleh. Are there no other interesting stories for young girls? Why are we sticking to this formula which was a bad formula to begin with. I’ve never liked romances where the love interest is a jerk.

The internet is huge!! HUGE!!! I can’t feel the size of the Earth or the Universe, but I can feel the size of the internet. Once again, I’m reminded of a passage from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the description of the Magrathean factory floor:

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He continued: “I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too … large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you.”

Arthur made nervous noises.

Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly. “It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.”

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

Arthur’s senses bobbed and span, as, travelling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.

The wall.

The wall defied the imagination — seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man.

The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

“Welcome,” said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, travelling now at three times the speed of sound, crept imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, “welcome,” he said, “to our factory floor.”

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Apparently, without realizing it, Douglas Adams was very good at describing the internet. 🙂 Anyways, I think the description of the factory floor is a perfect description of the internet. Every now and then, this feeling hits home as I surf or investigate a new technology. And I’m feeling it again as I read about and play with IRC, and toy with the idea of setting up my own fserve.

So there were some nice pages about time management. Most of them were university pages written to help students manage their time. There was the occasional scary page that resembled a written infomercial complete with crap testimonials and bone-chilling web design created by the marketing and sales staff. But I found some good information. I wonder if I’ll get more done now, or at least feel less snowed-under and anxious by everything that needs to be done….

There isn’t enough time. No matter how I rearrange things… no matter how twist, swap, or contort all the things I would like/need to do in the day, I still am desperately short on time. I wonder what Google has to say about time management. Although I have a dreadful feeling that “time management” is just a couple of words used to sell expensive books and courses to people like me with too much to do and not enough sense to see a scam surrounded by fancy words, but we’ll see…. surely the Oracle has the answer…

Things have been soooo emotional recently. We’ve had the rollercoaster ride of money and jobs as the economy stumbles along, dragging us with it. We’ve had the emotional rollercoaster ride of trying to have a baby…. which is very emotional. Many people have been on the money/job ride and know what it feels like. But only a few have been on the terrible baby ride. It hurts more than you would imagine– more than I ever imagined it would. (Check out this site, if you feel up to the sorrow: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/tips/1809.html.) And then Savannah died.

I just want it all to settle down. I just want a breather.

I’ve never been an “It’s not fair” or “Why did it happen to me” kind of person. Having been a victim, you quickly learn not to be a victim. But lately, I could really use a personal favor from the universe.